The way Larian Studios designed Baldur’s Gate 3‘s narrative encourages players to take a Long Rest, after all, you’re completing main quests, companion quests, and events all the time during your journey.
On top of that, one Baldur’s Gate 3 player found out that using Long Rest will reduce bugs tied to narrative progression and reported their experience on Reddit. Ideally, players would take a Long Rest after a busy day, but a lot of players, myself included, often skip the Long Rest due to the sheer amount of temporary buffs and elixir effects.
While there seems to be a connection between taking Long Rests and fewer narrative bugs, the Baldur’s Gate 3 community has alerted that taking too many Long Rests makes your character lose some time-sensitive quests or negatively affects your campaign goals because the narrative also advances. A friend of mine, for example, took a Long Rest and an entire village was massacred during it without any feasible explanation.
Here are the quests the community has confirmed are affected by too many Long Rests. We spared you spoilers, but if don’t care about spoilers, you can read it all on Reddit.
Act one | Act two | Act three |
Grymforge main quest | Moonrise Prisoners | Newspaper |
Owlbear | Rolan | Kidnapping |
Druid Grove Ritual | Prisoner Execution | |
Lae’Zel and Mountain Pass | Gortash Coronation | |
Halsin and Goblin Camp | Saving Duke Ravengard and The Gondians | |
Burning Inn | ||
Harpies on the beach | ||
Caravan ambush | ||
Windmill Gnome | ||
Myconid Village | ||
Tiefling Bard | ||
Druid Grove Tiefling Thief | ||
Zhent Hideout | ||
Myrena’s Brothers | ||
Druid Grove Bugbear Ambush | ||
Druid Grove Goblin prisoner | ||
Illithid in Wreckage |
Although there are players saying that Larian Studios should fix Long Rests affecting the campaign, the developers most likely won’t. Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and DnD is a live universe in which you have to plan your Rest as the game never stops.
One thing you can do, though, is save your game before taking a Long Rest and if you don’t like what happened, you can reload and go play some more.
Reddit: A Baldur’s Gate 3 loot bug means you may be missing out on precious items